About the Authors

At the forthcoming Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm,
Germany, America will face intense pressure to agree to a
post-Kyoto deal on climate change that includes far-reaching
mandatory targets to cut carbon emissions. G-8 President and German
Chancellor Angela Merkel has endorsed increasing pressure on the
Bush administration to reverse its current environmental policies,
despite the United States' superior performance in emissions
reduction so far.

President Bush's May 31 remarks on the G-8 and climate change
have led to speculation that he may reverse course and agree to
binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions. This would be a
mistake. The administration should actively reject entreaties from
fellow G-8 nations to agree to growth-sapping controls on energy
use and instead continue its successful model in favor of economic
development. It must also encourage the G-8 to live up to the
themes developed at the 2005 Gleneagles summit, where the
administration placed the objective of reducing greenhouse gas
emissions firmly within the context of economic growth and poverty
eradication in the developing world.

Contrary to the
Gleneagles agreement, however, Europe has failed to concentrate on
policies other than Kyoto's cap-and-trade approach. The European
Union has arbitrarily capped member states' emission levels and
then forced companies and groups to buy carbon credits elsewhere.
Europe not only remains firmly committed to this approach for a
Kyoto II deal but also is increasing pressure on the United States
to sign up as well.

The big problem is that the EU's environmental policy-making is
based on doomsday scenarios of global warming, rather than sound
science. Most scientists agree that mankind's emissions of carbon
dioxide have had a marginal warming effect, but there is no
scientific consensus that global warming will cause catastrophic
climate change.

There are risks to global warming, but there are also risks to
global warming policies, and the latter could easily outweigh the
former. If the United States takes ill-conceived actions, many U.S.
jobs will wind up in Kyoto-exempt nations such as China and India
that will continue to emit greenhouse gases at higher rates per GDP
than the United States.

Rather than ratcheting down emissions via energy-rationing caps,
the United States has embarked on research efforts to develop new
technologies that are more carbon friendly and reached out to both
developed and developing nations to coordinate the creation and
deployment of these technologies. The current global warming
hysteria cannot last much longer, because it is unsupported by the
scientific facts. In the interim, the United States must resist
cap-and-trade measures, which would be costly and difficult to
reverse.

Sally McNamara
is senior policy analyst in European affairs in the Margaret
Thatcher Center for Freedom, and Ben Lieberman is senior
policy analyst in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy
Studies at the Heritage Foundation.